Finding the Human: The Social Theories of Early Cold War Memoranda

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Hosted by the Humanities Center and featuring faculty fellow, Paul Johnson.

Following the death of Franklin Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman was thrown into the complex and unfamiliar caldron of the Second World War's end and the murmurings of a new global conflict with the Soviet Union. Accordingly, he commissioned a number of reports evaluating the character of the Soviet threat, among them George Kennan's famous "The Sources of Soviet Conduct" and Clark Clifford and George Elsey's "American Relations with the Soviet Union." These, along with other reports, offer interpretations of Soviet regime behavior informed by the author's own interpretations of figures like Karl Marx, G.W.F. Hegel, and Gottlob Frege (among others). This paper looks at the rhetorical contours of the world iterated in some of these memos to understand the philosophical assumptions about the world that drove early Cold War decisionmaking, and ultimately how the war would in part be conducted by the aggressive construction of a globalist consumer citizen.

Respondents include Neepa Majumdar from Film & Media Studies + Dr. Kyong-Min Son, Associate Professor, Political Science & IR at the University of Delaware. This event will be hybrid, so you can attend it either in person in 602 CL or via Zoom as you prefer. Precirculated material for this colloquium will be available here about two prior to the event.